This is like, peak fucking Nazi. Like, are you sure you don't vote for the BNP every election?

This statement is very Nazi:
"yeah, a country ruled by non-traitors wouldn't "need" anyone from elsewhere - you might even think that creating the conditions for "need" of electing a new people and then doing exactly that are related, and indeed treason"

I read his stance as the following: Politicians have engineered the low birth rate (somehow) to make us need immigrants and that is treason.

I bet if we dig into why it's treason we lean it's because of ethnonationalism, because why the fuck is it treason to make other people citizens if not that?

Well, politicians did create an artificially low birthrate and encouraged immigration by making decisions that improved the economy. If you completely tank the economy and turn your country into a shithole where the majority of the population lives day to day on the brink of starvation and the only entertainment anyone can afford is unprotected sex, you both increase the birth rate dramatically and reduce the the immigration rate because no immigrants will want to come.

This is, obviously, a solution that most people reject.

Last edited by hyzmarca on Sat Sep 09, 2017 5:18 pm; edited 1 time in total

Because powerful men get away with terrible shit, and even the public domain ones get ignored, and then, when the floodgates open, it turns out there was a goddam flood behind it.

FrankTrollman wrote:

As far as death and human misery goes, Tobacco is basically World War II grinding on forever with no real sign of stopping in our life times. Death camps and nuclear bombs and stuff are certainly dramatic, but public health crises are always and forever bigger than wars on the global scale.

FrankTrollman wrote:

White people are basically just horrible...The entire Reagan Revolution is just white people voting to destroy their own social safety nets because they'd rather fucking starve than let black people eat.

So remember how Brexit continues to be a terrible idea and everyone who supported it is a fucking moron? Right. The Fail Train Continues.

The European Union has straight up told the UK that they aren't even going to have a discussion about what the trade status of the UK is with the EU after Brexit until the UK can submit a plan for what the Northern Ireland / Republic of Ireland border is supposed to look like. Not even hashing out an agreement with the entire EU about what the border rules should be, just to submit any position at all about what the border in Ireland can look like. The UK cannot and will not commit to any concrete proposal at all, and the talks are completely stalled.

Here's the problem: Theresa May says that she wants the UK to leave the customs union of the EU. In order to do that, there has to be a customs border somewhere. If you put a customs border on the island of Ireland between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, that is basically going to ruin the lives of everyone who lives in Belfast and also going to be a gross violation of the Good Friday Accords and probably going to restart a literal terrorist bombing campaign in Northern Ireland and across the UK. Not a real option. If you leave Northern Ireland as in (or de-facto in) the EU customs union and put a customs border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK you have effectively kicked Northern Ireland out of the UK. That is so anathema to the Democratic Unionist Party that they have said explicitly that they will terminate the government if that is the UK position - something they actually have the power to do. And of course, there is no option 3 because there isn't a fucking customs border between Dublin and Paris so if you don't put a customs border between Dublin and Belfast or between Belfast and London you can't have a meaningful customs border between London and Paris either.

That circle cannot be squared. It turns out that Brexit cannot be achieved by the UK as it currently exists. Which is probably to be expected since their actual fucking civil war was ended in a series of treaties that were based in large part on being in the EU and renegotiating those treaties at the same time as renegotiating all the others is patently absurd and always has been.

---

In more emblematic news, various opposition parties have been demanding to see the various economic impact reports that the UK government has been claiming they have been doing for various Brexit scenarios. Uh... turns out they do not exist and none of the 57 sets of analyses were ever really a thing.

Here's the problem: Theresa May says that she wants the UK to leave the customs union of the EU. In order to do that, there has to be a customs border somewhere.
...
That circle cannot be squared. It turns out that Brexit cannot be achieved by the UK as it currently exists.

I mean, no border means completely open trade and travel, full rights of EU citizens means no pograms or cutting off people's healthcare or their kids' education, what exactly are they leaving behind? You can't even end any of the regulations if you keep the fucking common market, because your goods and services obviously still have to follow the EU rules.

What's left to throw away? Their seats in Brussels and any influence over the future rules they'll be following anyway?

Yeah, I'm not sure how "literally no idea other than just not going ahead with it" (which basically seems to be what they want at this point) counts as progress, but apparently it's enough that talks can go ahead.

That said, it looks like they're accepting "Okay we'll call it a Brexit and the people who voted for it are too stupid to even read details so they'll be happy that they got the thing they asked for, but we'll basically change absolutely nothing." Which is technically one option. And probably the least-bad._________________

Count Arioch the 28th wrote:

There is NOTHING better than lesbians. Lesbians make everything better.

Well a significant bit is that EU people emigrating to the UK will become harder, which I guess will satisfy the brexiters to some degree too, but all in all yes seems like things may turn out not super destructive._________________

FrankTrollman wrote:

Actually, our blood banking system is set up exactly the way you'd want it to be if you were a secret vampire conspiracy.

Except how the only thing they have "worked out" so far is that EU people can still immigrate just as easily. And that's literally the only thing they've decided at all._________________The perfect analogy for capitalism is a teenage kid, who refuses to listen to his dad when he gives him a tip on solving a problem. And keeps optimizing how to rake the yard using the handle instead of the head.

DSMatticus wrote:

Kaelik gonna kaelik. Whatcha gonna do?

That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.

The best part is that the UK has agreed that in the event of no deal being reached that the UK continues to follow EU product regulation but no longer gets seats in the parliament that writes said regulation. So basically Brexit means that the UK gets to be a territory of Europe rather than a province. A Puerto Rico solution as it were. But since all they really did was agree to have a discussion by having the UK prime minister say they were willing to have terms of the divorce dictated to them if they couldn't reach an agreement in the future, there's still plenty of time for this to explode.

I expect that it will gradually dawn on Brexiteers that they can't actually stop following EU commerce regulations if they don't have a customs border and that will cause desertions in the parliament. Which means that the fundamental problem that there does not exist any actual Brexit terms that could be written that would enjoy majority support in the general populace or parliament continues to lumber on.

This particular act of can kicking just underlines how fucked this all is. The DUP has already said they'd pull the trigger on Theresa May's government if there was a customs border between Northern Ireland and the UK. And if there also isn't a customs border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland the UK has not left the Customs Union.

Newer details on the negotiations. To keep them going, they managed to make the border deal so amazingly vague that Henry Kissinger would've soiled himself. But that's barely the first hurdle. It's gonna get a lot worse for the Britts very soon.

Also of note: the parliament just voted to officialize the stance that Theresa May does not have the unconditional backing of parliament, and that whatever she agrees to will still have to be ratified by parliament to be actually binding.

Since there's still literally no possible final deal that can be reasonably expected to have the backing of half of parliament, we're basically at square one again. May is off to Brussels to start negotiations, with every member of the coalition aware that she doesn't even have the backing of her own party, let alone the government as a whole, to promise anything at all.

If I was a member of the commission, I'd still have to show up to her talks, because it would make me come off as unreasonable to not do so. But I can't imagine that I'd bother listening very closely to the things she's saying at the moment.

I expect that it will gradually dawn on Brexiteers that they can't actually stop following EU commerce regulations if they don't have a customs border

Why not?

I mean, it seems to me that a lack of a customs boarder would allow the UK to undermine EU commerce regulations, if they wanted to, be essentially providing a safe haven to anyone that wants to flaunt those regulations.

And then if the EU closes the border on their side, they can get bombed by angry Irishmen.

I expect that it will gradually dawn on Brexiteers that they can't actually stop following EU commerce regulations if they don't have a customs border

Why not?

I mean, it seems to me that a lack of a customs boarder would allow the UK to undermine EU commerce regulations, if they wanted to, be essentially providing a safe haven to anyone that wants to flaunt those regulations.

And then if the EU closes the border on their side, they can get bombed by angry Irishmen.

The problem with the "just stop following laws" idea is that the EU as a whole is much more powerful than the UK specifically and has a lot of points of leverage. The amount of money tied up in the London banking institutions is significantly more than the value of the trade that flows across the Irish border.

An EU clamp down on the UK's financial services sector could cause UK GDP to fall by 200 billion dollars or more, meaning the EU has plenty of arrows in their quiver to tit for tat British intransigence without closing the Irish border.

The evidence from the Brexit negotiations so far and the dictates the Greeks were given earlier is that the EU is very willing to use its power. They've publicly warned the UK that they have to accept EU regulations to get a deal without a customs border; Ireland's insisted that to get any kind of a deal the UK have to go for one without a customs border. The EU's backed them.

The EU has also put a clause in saying that the negotiations so far need to be translated into law ASAP to continue negotiations in the second phase, after the UK's Brexit secretary (David Davis) suggested that the UK might back out of those commitments if no deal resulted. i.e. backing out of paying the 'divorce bill', or stripping out EU regulations, is going to be slow and difficult if it's possible at all.

I'm not sure whether its opportunists going for everything they can get or the EU trying to make an example out of the UK, or the EU trying to convince the UK to forget about Brexit, but it looks like any possible deal (or no deal) is going to see the UK humiliated and much poorer.

As I've said before the EU gets approximately the same moral of "leaving us is a fucking stupid idea" with either "this country did it and were ruined" or "this country thought about doing it and changed its mind before too late"._________________

Kaelik wrote:

Because powerful men get away with terrible shit, and even the public domain ones get ignored, and then, when the floodgates open, it turns out there was a goddam flood behind it.

FrankTrollman wrote:

As far as death and human misery goes, Tobacco is basically World War II grinding on forever with no real sign of stopping in our life times. Death camps and nuclear bombs and stuff are certainly dramatic, but public health crises are always and forever bigger than wars on the global scale.

FrankTrollman wrote:

White people are basically just horrible...The entire Reagan Revolution is just white people voting to destroy their own social safety nets because they'd rather fucking starve than let black people eat.

The evidence from the Brexit negotiations so far and the dictates the Greeks were given earlier is that the EU is very willing to use its power. They've publicly warned the UK that they have to accept EU regulations to get a deal without a customs border; Ireland's insisted that to get any kind of a deal the UK have to go for one without a customs border. The EU's backed them.

The EU has also put a clause in saying that the negotiations so far need to be translated into law ASAP to continue negotiations in the second phase, after the UK's Brexit secretary (David Davis) suggested that the UK might back out of those commitments if no deal resulted. i.e. backing out of paying the 'divorce bill', or stripping out EU regulations, is going to be slow and difficult if it's possible at all.

I'm not sure whether its opportunists going for everything they can get or the EU trying to make an example out of the UK, or the EU trying to convince the UK to forget about Brexit, but it looks like any possible deal (or no deal) is going to see the UK humiliated and much poorer.

If you-re a big, fat slob, and you constantly tell everyone that you can sprint faster than Usain Bold, only to be challenged and easily defeated by said Bold, he did not humiliate you.
YOU humiliated yourself.
Great Britain is a global nuclear power that has not been conquered for hundreds of years. If they just wanted out, they could just declare that they are indeed out. And that would be it. What they really want is to have the cake and eat it: full access to the EU market and exception from all EU regulation. And that is not possible, and Brussels telling them that is not rude, but realistic.

So on Monday, the senior ministers of the United Kingdom had a staff meeting to try to hash out exactly what it was that the UK was even asking for out of the Brexit negotiations. Now the real story isn't that they didn't reach consensus - it's fucking obvious that you can't reach consensus because the entire idea is absurd. No, the real story is that their meeting on Monday was literally the first time they'd had a meeting to try to set negotiation goals.

BBC, December 18th, 2017 wrote:

Mrs May's statement to MPs came after she and her senior ministers formally discussed for the first time what the UK's long-term relationship with the EU should be.

Be fair, Frank. It's very hard to schedule all those government ministers to meet together in the same place at the same time and talk about their actual jobs or some shit. Just think about all those corporate fundraiser dinners they're constantly invited to - that leaves such little room for actually working._________________

Count Arioch the 28th wrote:

There is NOTHING better than lesbians. Lesbians make everything better.

No the point is that at this point the UK can't reverse anything with enough votes because they've already sent the Article 50 Letter to the European Parliament. At this point the only thing the UK can do is to present possible deals to the rest of Europe and beg them to ratify them in less than 2 years despite the fact that the treaties they are meant to replace took decades to negotiate.

The UK is completely fucked. Right now the people of the UK are living in a bizarre fantasy world where they have lots of negotiating power and a bunch fo serious adults in charge who are going to fix everything, but they don't. They don't have any of that.

Article 50 was never meant to be invoked. But it has been invoked and now all it does is give a hard deadline for when a bunch of treaties expire. That's fucking it. The UK has given itself a hard deadline by which they have to speed date every other country in Europe.

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TFwiki wrote:

Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.

Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.

You want to stay right?
Because if you don't, we are going to kick you out of our treehouse. No ladder. No Parachute. Straight out the door you go.

That's exactly what that means.

Quote:

With deft diplomacy, Britain can avoid being ripped off. May is not wrong about the depth of mutual economic and strategic interest in play. A partnership that meets the prime minister’s ambitions of depth and specialness is feasible. But, from the EU point of view, the most that Brexit can do is raise the UK up to be first among third countries. May might claim that as a triumph, another fairytale red-line defence against the Brussels beast. Or she could tell the truth: there was once a better deal, before Britain voted to leave.

May could potentially get a lot of concessions by playing atomic chicken. It would be a terrible idea that would completely destroy the UK's credibility, but if she expresses a willingness to burn down the entire continent with atomic hellfire if she does not get her way, then it's possible that the EU will back down due to not wanting to risk the consequences if it isn't a bluff.

May won't do that, because as insane as she is she's not that insane, but it remains the only way that the UK can actually get the deal that they want.

Or the EU could decide: fuck the island monkeys, we have nukes as well and over there won't hurt us as much. Or America could decide that.
Imagine the shame of being named in one line with North Korea, Iraq/Iran(whut's the diffrence eh?) and other axis of evil states . ._________________Welcome, to IronHell.

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Shrapnel wrote:

TFwiki wrote:

Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.

Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.